Online advertisers and campaign managers (including their agents or proxies) are eager to efficiently and effectively manage their online advertising campaigns, including maximizing return on investment and achieving their particular campaign objectives. Often, online advertising systems utilize an auction-based format, in which advertiser bids are used in specifying an amount the advertiser is willing to pay, for example, for an amount of impressions, within certain parameters, during a specified period and using a specified budget. In addition to, for example, specifying the advertisement or type of advertisement, other parameters may be specified, such as a required context, keywords, rank, position, targeting attributes, etc.
The right bidding can be crucial to campaign effectiveness, return on investment, and achievement of campaign goals. For example, too low bidding can lead to campaign underperformance, underdelivery, and failure to reach campaign and return on investment goals. Yet, too high bidding can also be detrimental to campaign performance, leading to suboptimal return on investment and campaign performance. Furthermore, poor bidding also adversely affects other involved entities, such as publishers and marketplace providers, who also realize lower profit from poor advertiser campaign performance, may underdeliver on advertiser contracts, and may further suffer from lower advertiser spend and involvement resulting from advertiser dissatisfaction with online advertising campaign performance.
Advertisers and campaign managers are often keenly aware of their particular campaign goals, budget, and other key parameters that are very important to campaign management and bidding strategy. Yet, they may have insufficient information with which to determine the right or optimal bid amounts. They may need to employ a trial and error approach, observing the affects of too low and too high bidding before trying to arrive at a reasonable bid price point, meanwhile wasting valuable time and suffering from poor campaign performance and return on investment.
There is a need for techniques for providing advertisers and advertising campaign managers with information to help them determine or optimize bidding and bid amounts in auction-based online advertising.